A host device may want to create a snapshot of a LUN (e.g., a point-in-time, a consistent image, and/or a read-only version of the LUN that corresponds to a physically addressable storage unit) for a variety of reasons (e.g., data migration, data restoration, data resynchronization). The LUN may be located on a volume of a storage system (e.g., the volume may have many LUNs) that is accessible to the host device through a network (e.g., a local area network, a wide area network, a storage area network).
To create the snapshot of the LUN, the storage system may need to take snapshots of every LUN on the volume because a snapshot operation may need to be taken at a volume level. Taking the snapshot at the volume level may be space inefficient because additional storage space may be required for snapshots of LUNs that the host device does not request. For example, unrequested LUNs on the volume may continue to perform write operations which may reduce the amount of blocks that are commonly shared thereby increasing a space requirement. The extra space requirement may reduce an effective free space in the volume. Furthermore, additional processing power and time may be needed (e.g., because of more storage I/O, meta-data lookups for the I/O) to process the unrequested LUNs resulting in productivity losses and delay.